Medieval period

St. Willibrord, Apostle of the Frisians and part of the Anglo-Saxon mission. He was the first Bishop of Utrecht.

From the 4th to the 6th century AD The Great Migration took place, in which the small Celtic-Germanic-Roman tribes in the Low Countries were gradually supplanted by three major Germanic tribes: the Franks, the Frisians and Saxons.

The most powerful of these were the Franks (who, at the time, resided between the Rhine and the Somme) and they converted to Catholic Christianity, during the reign of King Clovis I around 500 AD. Most of the region thus fell under the Frankish Kingdom and then the Carolingian Empire until the end of the 9th century. From the center of the Diocese of Tongeren-Maastricht-Liège, successively the cities of Tongeren, Maastricht and Liège, this part of the Low Countries was probably Christianized. According to tradition, the first Bishop of Maastricht, Servatius, was buried in this city in 384, though only from Bishop Domitianus (ca. 535) is it established that he resided in Maastricht.

The coastal Frisian Kingdom remained Germanic pagan but were eventually conquered by Charles Martel and incorporated into the Catholic Frankish Kingdom after the Battle of the Boarn in 734. The Northern parts of the Netherlands were converted as part of the Anglo-Saxon mission as Catholic Christians from the various kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England moved to the Continent, such as St. Willibrord, the Apostle of the Frisians and St. Boniface, who was martyred in Friesland. Both were active in the eighth century, having great impact on the conversion of the country. The areas in the Low Countries which would eventually become part of the modern Netherlands were part of Middle Francia and then Lotharingia, before eventually becoming part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as part of the Burgundian Netherlands. Originally under the House of Valois-Burgundy by the end of the 15th century it was part of the Habsburg Netherlands as part of a vast Catholic Habsburg Empire dominated by the Kingdom of Spain.

Since the rise of Calvinism

Pope Adrian VI, to date the only Dutchman to reign as Pope. He held the Papacy from 9 January 1522 until his death on 14 September 1523.

Since the War of Independence the Catholics were systematically and officially discriminated against by the Protestant government until the second half of the 20th century, which had a major influence on the economical and cultural development of the southern part of the Netherlands. Dutch Catholics were "reduced to the rank of second-class citizens" and were barred from all civil service positions; Catholics were not only barred from administrative posts such as that of a mayor, but they were also banned from minor ones such as lantern lighter and turf carrier.^[11] The church itself also faced harassment, and between 1703 and 1727 the papal nuncio was not allowed to enter the territory of the Netherlands. Increasingly marginalised, Dutch Catholics became one of the poorest groups in the Dutch society. According to Jan Roegiers, in many Catholic areas "not a single Catholic, aside from the pastor and his assistant, belonged to the intellectual and merchant class". The economic plight of Catholics was largely the result of discrimination by the Protestant majority.^[11]

From the Reformation to the 20th century, Dutch Catholics had largely been confined to certain southern areas in the Netherlands where they still tend to form a majority or large minority of the population. However, with modern population shifts and increasing secularization, these areas tend to be less and less predominantly Catholic. Registered Catholics still form a slight majority in the most southern province of the Netherlands, Limburg (refer to the overview by diocese above). After the Dutch Republic banned the Catholic religion in the 1580s the Netherlands became a mission territory under the canonical authority of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (the so-called Dutch Mission). The episcopal hierarchy was not restored until 1853, with the reestablishment of the episcopal hierarchy in the Netherlands.^[12]

Restoration of Catholic hierarchy

Religion in the Netherlands in 1849. Catholic-majority areas in green.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholics formed a separate social pillar, with their own schools, TV and radio broadcasting, hospitals, unions, and political party. They formed a coalition with orthodox Protestants, who also felt discriminated against. This pillarization and coalition government was important in emancipating the Catholics from their social exclusion. In the period between 1860 and 1960, Catholic church life and institutions flourished. This period is called "The Rich Roman Life" (Dutch: Het Rijke Roomse leven). During this period, the number of Catholics in the Dutch population grew to approximate parity with Protestants, as in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, and Germany.

Recent Era

At the Second Vatican Council, representatives of the Dutch Church were prominent on the liberal-wing: especially Cardinal Bernardus Johannes Alfrink, who had the Belgian periti Edward Schillebeeckx working under him and also Fr. Johannes Willebrands, who was involved in ecumenism and promoting religious liberty. While on the otherhand, Fr. Sebastiaan Tromp, a Dutchman who worked under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, was involved in drawing up the original conservative schemas which were thrown out. Following the Council, Schillebeeckx and Piet Schoonenberg released the Dutch Catechism, which was one of the more radical representations of the "spirit of Vatican II" in Europe. The Bishops' Conference of the Netherlands under Johannes Bluyssen was engaged in a number of controversies with Rome around this time, also, relating to a wide variety of issues from morality, to doctrine, to the liturgy.

After 1970, the emphasis on Catholic concepts and traditions such as hell, the Devil, sin, Confession, kneeling, catechesis, having the Host placed on the tongue by the priest, and the doctrine about widows' remarrying, divorce, and premarital sex rapidly disappeared; these concepts and traditions are rarely, if ever, found in modern Dutch Catholicism. A cultural divide is still found between the "Catholic" south and the "Protestant" north, but with a total of 1.5 million people and 20% of the industrial production in the Netherlands, the southern "Catholic" area BrabantStad has become one of the major economically important, metropolitan regions of the Netherlands.

In the 1980s and 1990s the church became polarized. The conservatives' main organization was Contact Roman Catholics. The liberals' main organization was the Eighth of May Movement (Dutch: "Acht Mei-beweging"), founded because of disputes about the papal visit in 1985; the Movement had a difficult relationship with the bishops, and disbanded in 2003.

Currently, Catholicism is still the single largest religion of the Netherlands with around four million registered members, 22.9% of the Dutch population in 2015.^[13][14] In 2006, in the Diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch (in the eastern part of North Brabant and in part of Gelderland), only 45,645 residents, mostly people over 65, attended Mass, only 2% of the total population in that area. In western North Brabant (the Diocese of Breda), the number of people associating themselves with Catholicism also strongly decreased. Church attendance is even lower in the west with only 1% of the West Brabantian population visiting churches in 2006.^[15] A planned visit of Pope Francis to the Netherlands was blocked by Cardinal Wim Eijk in 2014, allegedly because of the feared lack of interest for the Pope among the Dutch public.^[16]

92% of Dutch Catholics support same-sex marriage and 3% oppose it. 95% of Dutch Catholics believe society should accept homosexuality, while 4% believe society should not accept homosexuality.^[17]